I have found my 3Com Home Connect camera under a pile of other rubbish. When I plug it in all looks good, I get.....

May 6 20:17:41 linux kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:07.3-2, assigned address 2 May 6 20:17:41 linux kernel: usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x4c1/0x9d) is not claimed by any active driver. May 6 20:17:45 linux kernel: usb.c: registered new driver vicam May 6 20:17:45 linux kernel: ViCam based webcam connected May 6 20:17:45 linux kernel: ViCam webcam driver now controlling video device 0 May 6 20:17:45 linux insmod: Using /lib/modules/2.4.21-215-athlon/kernel/ drivers/usb/usbvideo.o May 6 20:17:45 linux insmod: Symbol version prefix '' May 6 20:17:45 linux insmod: Using /lib/modules/2.4.21-215-athlon/kernel/ drivers/usb/vicam.o

So far so good, now if I cat /dev/video0 the little led on the front of the camera lights up and loads of data'ish garbage appears in the console window. Here is where it starts to go wrong

The application I want to use the camera with (gnomemeeting) starting that gives me a "Error while setting the frame size." message when I select /dev/ video0 as the video device.

So now I want to hook up some sort of viewer to see if there is actually a picture comming out of the camera. So I tried xawtv and that just gives me a blue screen (not of death), I figured that it needs v4l to function. So I ran v4l-conf

v4l-conf: using X11 display :0.0 dga: version 2.0 mode: 1280x1024, depth=24, bpp=32, bpl=5120, base=0xd0000000 /dev/video0 [v4l2]: ioctl VIDIOC_QUERYCAP: Invalid argument /dev/video0 [v4l]: no overlay support

Here is where I start getting lost. Is there some step to process the stream from the camera I am missing, I thought that was the job of the Vicam driver. How do I set up v4l if it is incorrectly configured ? and do I need v4l to use the camera in gnomemeeting or does it access it directly....Or is there a better way to control/view the camera.